Under new rules coming into force in April, hospitals will have to list the income and assets from their charitable arms on their main balance sheet.

There are fears that this will see donations to health charities subsumed into the general health budget, which already faces huge strains due to Britain's soaring budget deficit.

The effect could be to deter people from giving money and put pressure on hospital bosses to channel donations designed for one thing into other areas of their budgets.

And that isn't likely to be anything useful...

So far, only the Lib Dems seem to be coming out against it:

Liberal Democrat spokesman Jenny Willott said: 'This could lead to hundreds of millions of pounds of charitable donations being effectively nationalised. 'The Government has no right to get its hands on any charitable NHS funds. People make donations on the understanding that it is up to charities to decide how to spend it, not ministers.'

Increasingly, charities are government and government is charity. You can see how they'd look at the funding as just one big pot, can't you?

Of course, this was specifically considered and rejected back when we had politicians who knew what they were doing...

Ministers were banned from counting charitable donations towards the central NHS budget under the legislation which created the health service in 1948.

That's Labour for you; never happier than when they can dismantle some prop from the apparatus of government...